EL7.AI
CryptoMedium•21 October 2026•
4 min read

Bittensor Lets Subnet Owners Adjust Reward Shares, Caps Owner Allocation at 33%

Key Facts

1The subnet owner's maximum share is 33% and can be reduced to zero under the general rule.
2The rules require miners to receive a share of at least 33%.
3The owner's share in a lease-created subnet cannot be reduced below 18% because it is tied to payments to crowdloan contributors.
4Owner adjustments must be separated by 50,400 blocks, equivalent to about 7 days at a block time of 12 seconds.

Bittensor has enabled subnet owners to control how Alpha token emissions are split within their networks, under rules capping the owner's share at 33%, according to the official upgrade guide. That share can be reduced to zero in subnets not covered by the leasing exception, allowing changes to the owner's portion of rewards. The rules also require miners to receive at least 33% of emissions. Validators' share is capped at 50% and, when adjusted, must exceed the root network's baseline share. Bittensor said in its release announcement that "one fixed split cannot fit them all," explaining the move to give subnets flexibility in distributing their incentives.

New subnets start with the historical default split of 18% for the owner, 41% for validators and 41% for miners, according to the emission weights documentation. Burn and recycling shares are zero at creation, and current rules require both components to remain disabled in the allocation vector. The upgrade transition was designed so that payouts in the first block after it match those in the last block before it, according to the release announcement. The migration also preserves the previous state of the owner's share, including for subnets where that share was disabled. The transition therefore does not impose the historical default split on all existing subnets, instead retaining their payout configuration immediately before the upgrade.

Lease-created subnets are subject to an exception preventing the owner's share from falling below 18%, according to the owner emissions settings documentation. That share is used to pay contributors to the crowdloans associated with those subnets. This category therefore retains the minimum set at launch, even as the owner's share can be reduced to zero in the other category. The new allocation controls are part of the subnet owner's broader role in defining the incentive mechanism, as outlined in the subnet operations guide. That role includes determining what miners must produce and how validators must assess that output.

The root network's baseline share is paid first from the allocation earmarked for validators and recalculated from the live chain state in every block, according to Bittensor's documentation. The amount the root network receives remains capped at the validator allocation itself, even as its baseline share changes over successive blocks. If the baseline share subsequently rises above that allocation, the root network receives the entire allocation, leaving nothing for Alpha validators. A fix to this mechanism was merged into the network's development history on 16 October 2026. The fix removed each subnet's TAO weight from the mechanism protecting the root share, according to the change log.

The change is limited to splitting emissions within a subnet and does not alter the amounts of TAO or Alpha injected into its pool, according to the release announcement. The emissions mechanism begins with liquidity injections at the block level before moving to the distribution of accumulated Alpha at the subnet's epoch. At that epoch, tokens are distributed to the owner, miners, validators and stakers through the Yuma consensus mechanism, according to the official documentation. On overall issuance policy, a TAO Synergies filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said the first halving occurred on 15 December 2025. That halving took place when total issuance reached 10.5 million TAO, according to the filing.

The rules restrict owner adjustments to the shares to intervals of 50,400 blocks, equivalent to about 7 days at a block time of 12 seconds, according to the upgrade guide. The waiting period remains tied to the subnet, so transferring ownership to a new owner does not reset it, while root authority is exempt from this restriction. To implement changes, developers must use the new emissions allocation interface instead of the two legacy commands for adjusting the owner's share. Both commands now return a deprecation result, having been replaced by the new owner-share component, according to the guide. The execution tool offers a dry run showing fees, effects and the policy check result before submitting a request to adjust the shares to the network.